James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
Labour MPs blaming Rachel Reeves over welfare cuts are like teenagers blaming their mum for telling them to wear a coat when there are bloody great storm clouds on the horizon. It’s silly and it won’t save them from getting soaked. But this is emerging as part of the blame game over Labour’s welfare debacle,
A Labour government facing a rebellion over welfare reform is something of a dog-bites-man story – Labour never finds this issue easy. But the nature of the current rebellion tells us something novel and revealing, not about the policy, but about the modern Member of Parliament. Yes, principle and policy matter here, but what’s really driving
Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review does more than set budgets. It exposes a contradiction at the heart of Labour’s approach to government: a party that wants to rebuild the state won’t take the hard decisions needed to make that possible. The review was more painful that it needed to be for Labour, because Labour MPs have
Nigel Farage’s march to the left continues. Reform is now committed not just to reinstating winter fuel payments for all pensioners but also, more significantly, to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. This is striking but shouldn’t be a surprise. Reform’s move to the left on economic questions has been arguably the most important political
Nigel Farage declared earlier this year that ‘economics might be bigger than immigration for us at the next election’. Most people at Westminster didn’t take him particularly seriously. After all, Reform UK is all about immigration, right? Westminster didn’t take Farage seriously. After all, Reform UK is all about immigration, right? When Farage based his local election
Rachel Reeves’ Treasury team and the No. 10 communications staff should enjoy a drink tonight. The Spring Statement is a success, at least in the terms that matter most to the Chancellor. That statement is probably most important for what it tells us about Reeves’ priorities. She’s more worried about the gilt markets than about Labour
Keir Starmer’s imminent attempt to curb Britain’s spending on welfare is a more serious and important bid to curb the growth of government than Elon Musk’s theatrical Doge performance. That is because the UK’s Labour government is at least engaging with the fundamental driver of higher public spending – the demographic shift towards an older
Labour ministers’ frustration at what they see as a sclerotic civil service is finally boiling over. Most people familiar with the machinery of government would accept that Labour’s Pat McFadden has a point when he says the civil service needs to change so that elected ministers – of whatever party – can do the things they were
Sir Keir Starmer has promised an inquiry into the events around the Southport murders committed by Axel Rudakubana, saying there are questions about the ‘Westminster system’. ‘I’m angry about it,’ the Prime Minister says. ‘Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry.’ It is not yet clear who will run that inquiry, or how.
It’s gilts season at Westminster. This is one of those unpredictable events, like the passing of a comet, that sees the residents of the political village staring at the skies and imputing all sorts of divine causes to the curious flashing lights they see there. Because of the ongoing excitement in the markets, a lot
From the start of Elon Musk’s onslaught, Sir Keir Starmer’s position in refusing a new national inquiry into the grooming and rape of girls across England has looked fragile. This weekend that position – and Labour’s parliamentary discipline – will be tested further. That’s because Labour are now away from the Commons, back among their voters. Labour
Why do jokes about Rachel Reeves’s CV persist? One explanation is simple: it’s funny. The Chancellor’s public persona is strait-laced and orderly; the idea of her doing something slightly naughty and gilding her CV is good material for comedy. But is that all? Reeves’s tweaks to her LinkedIn profile are, bluntly, trivial. They’re also minor compared
John Prescott has died, leading to a flood of tributes and comments about the working class hero of the New Labour project. That framing of Prescott is good for headlines but the reality was inevitably more complicated than that. It’s too shallow and narrow to describe Prescott as the lone working class voice in an essentially
The humiliating post-premiership of David Cameron is the gift that keeps on giving. He might have been gone from No. 10 for more than eight years, but pretty much everything involving him that’s happened in British national life since his departure has been a reminder of the awful emptiness of his time in office. At
The Budget has started a fight between the government and GPs. As is often the case with doctors, that fight is about money, but there is also something even more valuable at stake: the proper public understanding of general practice and the NHS. When I ran a thinktank, I kept a list of things I
As Rachel Reeves prepares what is potentially the most difficult Budget in a generation, a question occurs: what if the Conservatives had, somehow, won the election? Historians hate counterfactuals, considering them unhelpful parlour-games. Personally, I enjoy a good ‘what if’ – not least because they can help put current political events in context. In that
Rachel Reeves is cutting £1.4 billion of pensioner welfare payments with her winter fuel payment means-test. It sounds like a big number, but it’s not. £152 billion is a big number. That’s the total value of welfare payments to pensioners in 2024/25. It’s more than we spend on the NHS. Taking the £1.4 billion annual
Parliamentary oath-taking rarely causes excitement. MPs swearing the oath of allegiance to the Crown after an election is an archaic yet prosaic sight: line up, shuffle in, say the words, shuffle off. Repeat 600-odd times. It’s a bit different this time, because so many of the MPs are first-timers. Nonetheless most of their swearing-in moments
The Conservative party is in disarray. What the party does next matters for the whole of Britain and maybe even for all of liberal democracy. For the British centre-Right to follow its American and French counterparts into nativist populism would be a shift of global and historical significance. Such serious times call for serious people. So, naturally, David
A couple of years ago, an anecdote about Keir Starmer did the rounds at Westminster. The story was that when asked about his time leading the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), he said that his proudest achievements involved overhauling IT systems, or procurement rules, or some other highly procedural aspect of the organisation’s bureaucracy. The story
